


The New Yorkers' Guide to Beating Back the Big Fucking Evil

by nwhepcat



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Grieving Clint, Post-Battle of New York (Marvel), Post-Loki Clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 21:06:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1319185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nwhepcat/pseuds/nwhepcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two days after Coulson's memorial, Clint isn't doing so well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The New Yorkers' Guide to Beating Back the Big Fucking Evil

**Author's Note:**

> Rating for language, but you probably figured that one out.  
> Title inspired by Adam Gnade's _The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin' Sad_ (Pioneers Press), which is a thoroughly awesome thing.

Even with half his living space in post-Loki shambles, Tony Stark still has enough guest rooms to put a New York boutique hotel to shame. That goes double for the decor. Clint's room has a bathroom half the size of his last apartment, with more shower heads than his last three. And he's pretty sure that the painting across from the giant bed is an actual original by some famous dude. It surpasses luxury and heads straight into the ridiculous. In a week that started with aliens riding giant armored worm things, this feels just as surreal.

The splendor pales on Monday morning at the ungodly hour of what-the-fuck. Multiple crews invade the tower to continue the reconstruction and start in on building the Avengers' permanent homes. The whole world seems to explode in hammering, sawing, knocking down walls and at least four boomboxes playing different music. Muttering curses, Clint gets out of bed and decides to get the fuck out of Dodge before Bruce becomes as disgruntled by all this as he is. 

Scrawling a note to slip under Natasha's door, he leaves the tower only to find the city itself is a construction zone. Make that a war zone, but the heavy machinery has moved in to start shifting rubble and utility crews are working to restore water mains, tearing up big chunks of pavement.

If the racket in Stark Tower was nightmarish, Midtown is hellish. But if anyone deserves to be in hell, it's Clint. He helped make this happen. Though his original impulse had been to get as far away from this part of town as possible, Clint finds himself wandering through the battle zone, taking in the devastation. This is one time when seeing from ground level gives him the clearest view. A rear view mirror in the street with a rosary still looped around the post. Workers in respirators dealing with the wreckage of a dry cleaning store, surrounded by heaps of fabric in pinstripes, charcoal and of course New York black. The occasional bright garment knotted in with the others seems so out of place as to be offensive. Dark stains mar the pavement by large chunks of masonry, like the last remaining evidence of roadkill. The worst, though, are the memorial shrines and the handmade posters of still-missing people. It's the largest of the shrines, plastered with pictures, surrounded by flowers and guttering candles in votive cups, that sends Clint away from the devastated areas and to the High LIne. 

Once he climbs to the park, he can't bring himself to look back over the landscape he's just traveled. He gazes over the piers and the Hudson instead, but the river view fails to settle his thoughts. After a while he drops onto a bench and buries his face in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. He doesn't know how to live with this, any of it: the missing and the dead, here in the city, in Germany, in SHIELD. The absence of Phil's voice in his ear. The disappearance--and this is so fucked up he'll never be able to tell anyone--of Loki's voice in his head, where it had once erased all uncertainty. Glorious fucking purpose, yeah.

Clint startles as the bench shifts subtly and a hand settles on his shoulder. He snaps his upper body toward the intruder, fumbling for the ankle sheath that he failed to strap on this morning. By the time he's registered its absence, he realizes it's unnecessary. The other side of the bench is occupied by a woman who looks to be about a decade older than Clint, wearing a plain white shirt and a dark skirt. 

"Lady," he snarls, "I'm not in the mood to talk about Jesus or Buddha or Mithras or whatever else you have in mind." (Or Loki--especially not Loki.)

To his surprise, she laughs. "That's a relief. I came to listen or just sit with you or whatever might help. I'll even go away, if that would help."

Eying her, Clint asks, "So what's in it for you?"

The woman quirks a smile. "Knowing the motherfuckers didn't win."

Clint can't suppress a laugh. 

"Seriously," she says. "We're New Yorkers. We know how to step up in a crisis. We know how to be good to each other. I want to be part of that. It makes me feel better, too." 

Her voice wobbles a little on her last sentence, which allows Clint to drop the wariness. "All right," he says, offering his hand for her to hold. She takes it. This still feels weird as hell to him--he's not given to touching people he knows somewhat well, much less strangers. But she seems perfectly at ease with it, and that keeps the weirdness level manageable. 

Clint doesn't look at her at all--that would increase the strangeness a thousandfold--but he finds himself breathing in tandem with her. Suddenly he feels like he hasn't gotten a proper breath since the end of the battle. He hasn't been to the range because he hasn't gone near SHIELD except when required. Not only had he forgotten how to breathe, but he'd also lost sight of why--the steadiness and clarity that it brought. Being cut off from that, combined with the loss of Phil's steadying voice, completely unmoored him. 

By the time he thinks to ask her name, she's getting ready to head back to her job. Naomi, she tells him. He offers his own in return, and walks her back to her office. 

This is what she does during her lunch hour. As he makes his way back toward Stark Tower, he sees that she's right. People on the street are saying hello to one another--to _him_. A girl with a nose ring helps an old lady pick her way around the rubble. A shop owner plasters his windows with lost pet and found pet flyers. _We know how to be good to each other._

He sees a guy painting the plywood covering a broken shop window with the Statue of Liberty giving the finger to a Chitauri rider. A block later he spots another plywood painting by the same artist, this one of Liberty dressed in overalls, work boots and gloves, a hammer in her upraised fist. Around the corner is another boarded window, this decorated with Liberty laying a big kiss on a startled Hulk, her verdigris fingers contrasting with the deeper green of his cheeks. Clint snaps a picture with his phone so he can show Bruce. 

This is how New York deals. With humor, with the inspiring and the profane, with energy and purpose. Maybe more mundane than glorious, but Clint's had enough of the glorious for a lifetime. 

This is how people who aren't superheroes and assassins beat back evil. This is how New York makes sure the motherfuckers don't win.


End file.
